The dangers of saying Trump is “crazy”, “insane”, “pathological”, or “diagnosable”
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In recent months there has been a steady uptick in media coverage of trump discussing whether he or his proponents are “crazy”, “insane”, “pathological”, or “diagnosable.” You can find one example here in this Mother Jones article titled “Here is Every Crazy, Insane, Terrible, Genius, Infuriating Thing Donald Trump Did This Year” and another example in the image meme below, the text of which describes the Republican party as filled with people who are “crazy.”

crazy

There are many disability critiques of the tendency to use these mental illness terms to describe people whose behavior or values we find to be strange, immoral, or unreasonable.  Very few focus on something so simple as the notion that this is offensive to persons with mental illness. Rather, such critiques caution against conflating mental illness with what appears to us to be immorality and/or irrationality.  Nice introductions to this critique of “ableism” can be found here and here.
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However, it is worth attending specifically to how these terms are deployed in the current election.  David M. Perry considers this phenomenon’s appearance in presidential politics in his blog entry, “Medicalizing Presidential Candidates, past and present.”

[I am talking about] the drive to medicalize Trump’s behavior. The other day I wrote some opening thoughts, along with a storify, on the casual pathologization of Trump’s objectionable behavior. It’s had an afterlife to which I’ll link below. My general thought – we do not need to armchair diagnose Trump to beat him. Leveraging disability stigma to defeat Trump is, at the least, a morally complex choice. I’d like people to think hard before doing it. I won’t be doing it myself. 

I suggest you click through to the article. Agree or disagree, it is worth thinking about.

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